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Author: Kelvin Newman

Kelvin Newman is SiteVisibility's Creative Director and is the editor of the UK's most listened to Marketing Podcast. He also spends his time at conferences, tweeting too much and working on top secret research and development projects.

Now there’s one thing you can be certain of whenever there’s a new launch from Facebook there’s going to be a huge amount of speculation about what it means for digital marketers; but now they’ve made a stab at launching a search engine - there will be even more than usual.

Despite that lack of practical experience of the new functionality, for the last couple of years I’ve thrown myself into understanding the Edgerank Algorithm, aka the rules that decide what appears in your newsfeed and come from a search marketing background.

As we wave goodbye to 2012 and say hello to 2013, there’s a good chance, you, like many other people, have been working to put together a content marketing strategy for the new year.

No doubt you’ll have the objectives in place, created a well thought out strategy and work plan as long as your arm.

It’s that last element I want to help you with in this blog post, by sharing a clutch of tools and services which will save you time, improve your results and give you the freedom to work on the creative aspects of your campaign.

First up a great big caveat emptor: in conversion rate optimisation there’s no such things as rules, there’s only findings. What may prove emphatically effective in one test, might be a waste of time in another similar situation.

Having said all that, there are a number of hardwired human traits and behavioral patterns understood by psychologists, behavioral economists and other social scientists that we can use to increase our conversions.

I have identified 12 brands that understand some of these common behaviors and have reflected it within their web designs. Examples like this can give you some ideas of potential things to try and test on your users.

But a lot has changed since then in the world of Facebook. As I'm currently putting together a presentation for the upcoming Econsultancy Digital Shorts event in Manchester on Edgerank and other social algorithms, now seemed the perfect time to revisit the piece to update and expand it.

Well, it's a few days since Google announced Search Plus Your World and I’ve had a chance
to start to think a little about how this dramatic shift in the personalisation
of results might change the day-to-day tactics of the search campaigns I work
on.

Please note: I’ll be referring
this as Search+ henceforth, rather than the namepuke “Search Plus Your World”.

Here are six small tweaks to make to your SEO campaigns, thanks to Search+...

EdgeRank is one of the most important algorithms in marketing. Despite this, very few people have heard of it and fewer still can claim that they fully understand it.

EdgeRank is the name of the algorithm which Facebook uses to determine what appears in their users’ news feeds. The news feed is Facebook’s ‘Killer App’. There is a plethora of information available to Facebook users, and the newsfeed is the order in which it appears.

It determines which of your connections is the most important to you and thus appears most frequently, and which kinds of content should appear higher than others. For anyone seeking to market a product or service on Facebook it’s essential you understand how this algorithm works.

Understanding the rules of the algorithm and changing your tactics to reflect the system can make the difference between a business changing campaign and an embarrassing failure. Yet despite this huge importance very little has been written about the algorithm.

There’s no secret in the SEO world that many of us suspect
that the reason why Google has been pushing Google+ so aggressively.

It isn’t just to
build its own successful social network, but also to gain access to data
on what content and websites are being shared socially as this could be a great
addition to their search algorithm.

You have to have been living below a rock the last year to
have missed out on studies which have suggested volume of
shares on Facebook and Twitter having a correlation with high
rankings.

There might not be causation there yet, but that certainly seems the
direction we’re heading in, with social signals becoming a ranking factor.

Here are five reasons why Google+ is already finding this data more useful than the Twitter Firehose...

There’s no question the difference between a successful search marketing campaign and one that fails is very rarely due to a lack of creativity or a naive strategy. Far more frequently it’s down to inefficiencies or wasted resources.

So what can you do to reduce those problems? Try and constantly improve things. Those changes are very rarely revolutions in your process, but just small refinements.

What follows are eight of those small refinements and improvements that I’ve made recently which I think have made me a better link builder.

A few weeks ago I released a mini eBook about link building for SEO titled “Becoming a Clockwork Pirate.” Although I put my heart, soul and everything I know about link building into the 30,000 word digital mini-book, that’s not what made the book most interesting.